Oct. 29 - Steve Hickok, deputy administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, has been elected by the Member Representatives Committee of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to serve as the members' chairman for 2008.

NERC's members are the owners, operators, users and other stakeholders of the integrated bulk power system of North America. The organization develops, proposes for approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and enforces mandatory reliability standards for the operation of the continent's bulk generation and high-voltage transmission. NERC is governed by an independent board of trustees who are elected by, and closely advised by the Member Representatives Committee.

"This year has been momentous for NERC, as the trustees and the Member Representatives Committee steered it through the transition from a voluntary industry self-regulatory body to a mandatory regulator whose standards have the force and effect of U.S. federal and Canadian provincial law," Hickok said. "The new NERC standards are now backed by the organization's ability to impose sanctions and fines as high as $1 million per violation per day, giving it a serious ability to carry out its duties and enforce its standards."

NERC's members are organized into twelve sectors, including investor-owned utilities, state and municipal utilities, cooperative utilities, U.S. federal and Canadian provincial utilities, transmission dependent utilities, merchant generators, electricity marketers, large consumers, small consumers, independent system operators, regional reliability organizations and government energy offices. The entities in each sector elect two representatives to the Member Representatives Committee. Hickok has been an elected representative of the U.S. federal and Canadian provincial utilities and is currently the Member Representative Committee's vice chairman.

For most of the past nine years, Hickok has been heavily involved in the transformation of NERC. He served on one of four work groups that redesigned NERC's governance from a stakeholder board to an independent board of trustees that is advised by and supported by a stakeholder committee. He then served as an advisor to the trustees on preparing for implementation of U.S. federal legislation that would make NERC's standard setting mandatory and enforceable.

Following passage of this legislation - part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 - Hickok chaired one of four work groups that wrote NERC's application to FERC to be certified as the single continent-wide Electric Reliability Organization that could design and enforce mandatory reliability standards under the new federal law. Hickok's group established the delegation of NERC's enforcement authorities to the eight regional reliability councils. The council under which BPA operates is the Western Electric Coordinating Council (WECC), headquartered in Salt Lake City.

BPA is a not-for-profit federal electric utility that markets about 40 percent of the electricity consumed in the Pacific Northwest. The power is produced at 31 federal dams and one nuclear plant in the Northwest and is sold to more than 140 Northwest utilities. BPA operates a high-voltage transmission grid comprising more than 15,000 miles of lines and associated substations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.